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Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Truth, Insanity of Release a.k.a. How Stephanie Perkins Saved My Mind

A couple of items of business first:

~ The winner of the Insomnia ARC from Monday's post is: Lena! Leave your email in the comments and I'll get in touch about sending it to you! Congrats!

~ Since Insomnia started shipping out early and the official release day is on a weekend, we're going to celebrate Insomnia's release on Friday...HOLY COW THAT IS SO SOON! Stay tuned for more info and check above for links to today's blog tour stops!

~~~~~

Dude...publishing is the most massive roller coaster I've ever been on. It's up and down, and in and out, over and over, until you feel like some bully in school is doing one of those toilet swirlies on your brain.

Releasing your debut novel is immense and terrifying and brilliant and breathtaking. It is everything you want it to be. Sometimes it is so much more, and occasionally so very much less.

There really is no explaining the gut-sucking sorrow and sadness when things go wrong with your dream. And no making sense of the elated floating and bounciness when even the smallest things go right.

It is absolute and utter madness.

Maybe that's why I write about people going crazy...

Anyway, the roller coaster is me this month...until yesterday...yesterday I went full-on freak out.

It wasn't pretty.

I found out there were some issues with Insomnia being mis-categorized in Barnes & Noble. It was coming up in their system as a Young Reader book (grades 3-6). The stores were looking at their option to order it from the warehouse into the store and going...uh, this cover looks too scary for the kids wandering that section...and not ordering it.

*cue visions of small children running for B&N door and crying over my scary book cover*

(Don't worry, it's being fixed and should be *crosses fingers* going out into stores asap.) So yeah...it was one of those last straw kind of freak outs and I did what I always do when I'm upset (after I break out the ice cream, duh...). I grabbed a book and started reading.

I've known Stephanie Perkins for a while online, and I actually met her in person a few weeks ago. *waves at Steph* She's a sweetheart and we share a love for things dark. Anyway, I'd started her book, Anna and the French Kiss about a year and a half ago, read the first chapter and loved it...then got a call from my agent and we got my book deal. It was dropped in the flailing/panicking that ensued and I haven't picked it back up.

So it was the first book I grabbed yesterday, and I didn't put it down until today when I finished. I carried it from room to room. I propped it open and kept reading while I did laundry. I stayed up until 3am reading and then started reading again as soon as I woke up this morning.

I adored this book. This book made me happy. This book reminded me why I love books.

All of that to say this isn't really about Anna or Stephanie's genius (as much as that's all I want to talk about right now). It's about books. We are authors, editors, readers, bloggers, publicists...we're all in the business of books, but sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in the roller coaster and the cogs and machinery of it that we forget what it's all about -- the books. Books allow us to explore, to escape, to revel, to live lives we aren't capable of, to become our heroes and even sometimes the villains.

So all of this to say,

Books are so freaking cool!!!

And none of us should forget that fact no matter what else we have going on.

Sorry to hear about the B&N screw-up, but glad to hear it should be fixed soon. Good reminder about the books. Love of books is what got us into this whole writing mess in the first place. I love books- my last two I read were Terry Pratchett and Christopher Moore. Love-Love-Love them.Shar

Hello, Hello!

I write YA Thrillers, I tweet, I watch football--not necessarily in that order. I'm the author of The Night Walkers Series: INSOMNIA, PARANOIA, MANIA. I also have standalone thrillers CUT ME FREE and THE ROW (10/11/2016) with FSG/Macmillan. My books have sold in more than a dozen languages and over twenty countries worldwide. No, I don't speak that many languages. Yes, I wish I did.
I'm represented by Kathleen Rushall of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.